Milestones:

Someday, One Piece, Fairy Tail, SAO, Index/Railgun and Dragon Ball will end.  Someday the anime of Bleach, Kimetsu no Yaiba, Shingeki no Kyojin and Sailor Moon will catch up with their already completed manga.

Someday Berserk, Edens Zero, Major, Boku no Hero Academia, MIX, Card Captor Sakura, Vinland Saga, No Game no Life, Hai to Gensou no Grimgar and Broken Blade will finish, and be translated into English.

Someday they'll finish animating Princess Principal and Girls und Panzer.

Choyoyu will be fully translated next month.

The world will be a very different place when all the best art in the world is behind us instead of in front of us.  For one thing, people will be able to experience the whole story at once, uninterrupted, while it's fresh on their minds.  No more stopping and starting fitfully across decades.  One united whole.  My re-read of Xanth has been very helpful in that characters like Mare Imbrium, who show up in book #5, Ogre Ogre, and book #43, Jest Right, are people I remember between books.  Now when I see Mare Imbri I think, 'oh yes from Faun and Games,' I don't wonder who she is or what she's doing here.

Xanth isn't over yet, but it will be soon -- Piers Anthony is too old to keep it going much longer.  In Jest Right we learn that Melody has a child, Aria, while never actually showing when she married, but given that she's the same age as Kadence, we can assume she married at the same time as Rhythm did.  Who is Melody's partner?  Anomie, aka 'The Dastard,' which I actually remember this time because I read 'The Dastard' recently instead of twenty years ago.  Now all that's left is the mystery of when Harmony will marry Bryce.  I gather this still hasn't happened yet, since neither Kadence nor Aria speak of a cousin that would be Bryce + Harmony's offspring.  This is now the biggest and most important detail for me in the Xanth series.  Until all the triplets are happily married I can't be sanguine.

I think people underestimate the worth of these series because they don't know the endings, which usually involve some exciting plot twist that changes everything that happened before then and gives you a whole new perspective on life, and because they've been consuming these products over decades, and have largely forgotten all the connections being made between the first half of the story and the second half.  It requires a reader who has every detail of the story in their short term memory to truly appreciate it.  I certainly experienced this vertigo when I played Hoshizora no Memoria's fandisk.  I didn't remember anything or anybody and the dialogue made half as much sense as it should have.  Yes, I of course had a vague sense of who these people were and why they liked each other, it's hard to forget everything, but that vague sense doesn't let you understand the true depths of a character's psychology or the meaningfulness of how they've changed in the new content.

Clannad and Code Geass had powerful emotional endings that occurred within a couple years of their beginnings.  People were able to keep track of the whole story and then reflect on the whole story when the curtains drew.  Now imagine One Piece, all 1500 episodes of it or whatever, with that same advantage.  It could easily become the #1 anime of all time.  Of course the ending needs to be good, something we can't be sure of yet because it hasn't happened.  But for people living in the midst of 30 or 40 year stories (Xanth started in 1977), it gets really hard to appreciate what is in fact the best art in history.  We won't really know what we have until the story is over, and we reread/rewatch it from the beginning, just like how I like Xanth a lot more this time than my previous experience stretched over my entire lifetime.

The impact this art can make on future generations, who have it all available at once and don't have to wait any longer, is difficult to imagine.  One Piece was already huge in Japan despite being full of filler and delays and hiatuses.  Imagine a streamlined One Pace version, subtitled in full into English, of the whole completed saga, that you could watch in a couple months all at once.  That's what kids in 2050 will be doing.

There's good art coming out all the time, but there are only a few milestones in life.  When a long story ends, and when that story is good enough to be worth revisiting from the start to the finish, to get the true experience and meaning of the story that the author always intended to portray in his mind.

The less ambitious author will focus on a story that can be told in a reasonable amount of time and adapted in a reasonable amount of time, and that will produce reasonable works like Love Live! Sunshine.  But the luminaries have bolder and bigger dreams, larger worlds, more characters, more events, higher stakes, longer timelines, and their stories are one in a million.  Sometimes the gamble doesn't pay off and the author dies before getting his job done, like Wheel of Time, but when the gamble does pay off -- sit up and take notice!

And Sailor Moon's gamble is paying off.  A canonical anime adaption of the manga is almost complete.  In Japan, it'll be done in a month or so.  For the rest of us maybe it will be done this year, but definitely by next year.  In any case it will be done in time -- Kotono Mitsuishi, the original voice actress of Sailor Moon, is still here and able to lend her voice to the iconic role to the very end.  A complete Sailor Moon anime is more important, in the long run, than a complete Love Live!, because Love Live! stuck to low-hanging fruit, but Sailor Moon reached for the outer galaxy.

Meanwhile, I downloaded the music to the DLC content of Xenoblade 3, 'future redeemed'.  It may have some more good original songs.  Nothing by Yasunori Mitsuda can be ignored, especially when the soundtrack to the main game was so good.  I listened to my two new fripSide songs their required 100 times, but now I have to start all over and listen to these songs 100 times before I can call my music hall of fame perfect.

P.S. Okay I've narrowed it down to one new song, 'Confronting Alpha,' I gave it 4 stars, moved Absolute Wish down to 2-star to make room, and stitched together Gracious and Graceful from Ogre Battle 64 to keep the total song count at 5500.  It's a good thing there was only one new good song or this task would have been a lot harder.  But it's quite a good song so I'm glad I collected it.